Thursday, March 27, 2008

Sales Proposal Checklist

A post I particularly liked  because of my affection for checklists  appeared on February 4. James shared a checklist for fine-tuning sales proposals that he developed based on a conversation with Tom Sant, an expert on the subject.

According to James and Sant, you should continue refining a sales proposal until you can answer Yes to all the following questions:

Does the customer know who we are?

Is the customer expecting us to bid on this?

Does the executive summary address customer needs?

Is the executive summary one page or less?

Have we replaced all the jargon that’s meaningful only to us?

Are we sure that another vendor doesn’t have the inside track?

Does the proposal follow the customer’s specified format and outline?

Have we removed all the meaningless marketing fluff (e.g. “state-of-the-art”)?

Has someone edited out other customer names from boilerplate material?

Is the writing clear and forceful rather than flat and technical?

Has the proposal been edited so that it contains no glaring grammatical errors? [I would delete "glaring."]

Can the proposal convince the customer that we can actually deliver?

Does the proposal define how we’ll measure customer satisfaction?

Is the proposal being submitted on time and to the right people?

In true Web 2.0 style, James invited further ideas from readers, and then presented the following additional suggestions in a subsequent post:

Does the proposal express a real need, want, and desire that the customer shared?

Does the proposal mitigate enough risk so that the customer is in a comfort zone?

Is there a deadline for the customer decision-making process?

Does the proposal make sense within the context of the customer’s corporate culture?

Can the customer actually afford your solution?

Is the proposal getting to the real decision-makers, or just going to purchasing?